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The Cold-Hearted Teenager With a brain still under development	By Vlad Tarko, Senior Editor, Sci-Tech News 7th of September 2006, 15:00 GMT Adjust text size:


A new study shows that teenagers hardly use an area of the brain involved in thinking about other people's emotions and thoughts, when considering a course of action. Scientists have found that a posterior area of the brain, involved in perceiving and imagining actions, takes over the area of the brain associated with higher-level thinking, empathy, guilt and understanding of other people's motivations. This area of the brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, develops as adolescents become more mature. "Thinking strategies change with age. As you get older you use more or less the same brain network to make decisions about your actions as you did when you were a teenager, but the crucial difference is that the distribution of that brain activity shifts from the back of the brain (when you are a teenager) to the front (when you are an adult)" said Dr. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. "The fact that teenagers underuse the medial prefrontal cortex when making decisions about what to do, implies that they are less likely to think about how they themselves and how other people will feel as a result of their intended action." Scientists asked teenagers and adults what actions they would take in a given situation while scanning their brains using the fMRI technique. For example, 'You are at the cinema and have trouble seeing the screen. Do you move to another seat?' A second set of questions asked what they would expect to happen as a result of a natural event e.g. 'A huge tree comes crashing down in a forest. Does it make a loud noise?' Teenagers and adults chose similar responses but the medial prefrontal cortex was significantly more active in adults than in teenagers when questioned about their intended actions. Teenagers activated an area of the brain known as the superior temporal sulcus. This region of the brain is involved in predicting future actions based on past actions. "We think that a teenager's judgement of what they would do in a given situation is driven by the simple question: 'What would I do?'. Adults, on the other hand, ask: 'What would I do, given how I would feel and given how the people around me would feel as a result of my actions?' The fact that teenagers use a different area of the brain than adults when considering what to do suggest they may think less about the impact of their actions on other people and how they are likely to make other people feel." This shows that the neural basis of the ability to understand other people's mental states, an ability that starts to manifest itself around the age of five, continues to develop and mature well past early childhood. "It seems that adults might be better at putting themselves in other people's mental shoes and thinking about the emotional impact of actions," Dr. Blakemore said. "The relative difficulty that teenagers have could be down to them using a different strategy when trying to understand someone else's perspective, perhaps because the relevant part of the brain is still developing. The other factor to consider is that adults have had much more social experience." "Whatever the reasons, it is clear that teenagers are dealing with, not only massive hormonal shifts, but also substantial neural changes. These changes do not happen gradually and steadily between the ages of 0-18. They come on in great spurts and puberty is one of the most dramatic developmental stages."

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